i heart dan savage

Apparently a study announced by researchers at Johns Hopkins last week found evidence that oral sex leads to increased chances of getting throat cancer.

If you and your girlfriend have had more than five oral-sex partners in your lives … you are both 250 percent more likely to develop throat cancer than some sad asshole who’s never had oral sex. “Researchers believe,” reports New Scientist, “[that] oral sex may transmit human papillomavirus (HPV), the virus implicated in the majority of cervical cancers,” and the virus lodges in the throat, where it can cause cancer. Study subjects infected with HPV were 32 times more likely to develop throat cancer; folks who tested positive for one highly aggressive strain of the virus, HPV-16, were 58 times more likely to develop throat cancer. Smoking, previously believed to be the culprit behind most throat cancers, only triples a person’s risk.

While this will probably be heralded by at least a few ultra-religous wingnuts as evidence that, see, missionary procreative sex is the only god-sanctioned non-throat-cancer-giving way to do it, Savage points out that the news that men can get cancer from HPV is probably the best thing that can happen as far as the HPV vaccine is concerned:

There’s a vaccine that offers 100 percent protection against the strains of HPV that cause cervical cancer in women and, it now appears, throat cancer in men and women. Religious conservatives believe that the HPV vaccine undermines abstinence education by making sex less risky. Never mind that numerous studies have shown that abstinence education does not work, HPV vaccine or no HPV vaccine. The right would rather see 4,000 American women die of cervical cancer every year than call off the idiotic, ineffective fraud that is abstinence education. And up to now the mainstream media have refrained from calling the right’s opposition to the HPV vaccine what it is—delusional, psychotic, homicidal—because up to now only women’s lives were at stake.

That’s about to change. Here’s the headline from my morning paper: “HPV Factors in Throat Cancer: Study Could Shift Debate About Vaccine.” You bet it will. Up to now, the HPV vaccine—which, again, has proven 100 percent effective against the cancer-causing strains of the virus—could merely prevent 10,000 cases of cervical cancer in American women every year, along with 4,000 deaths. But now the debate could shift—it will shift, it already has shifted—because it’s no longer “just” the lives of 4,000 American women that are on the line, but the sex lives of 150 million American men.

“If men got pregnant,” goes the bumper sticker, “abortion would be a sacrament.” Now that straight men can get cancer from eating pussy, the HPV vaccine is going to go from controversial to sacramental faster than you can say, “Suck my dick.”